The Pacific Coast Conference formed in 1915 with four charter members, Washington and Oregon among them, though the two schools first played football against each other in 1900. Recorded history is scarce, but it’s safe to assume they began hating one another shortly after.
This goes without explaining in the Pacific Northwest — forgive the brief detour here if you live in Bothell or Bellevue, Tualatin or Tigard — but Washington vs. Oregon is among the nation’s most underrated rivalries, if measured in terms of resentfulness. It’s technically a secondary rivalry, as each school pairs with a “natural” in-state rival. But you wouldn’t know it based on the bitter way the two fan bases regard each other.
Advertisement
You’re about to hear the schools discussed together a lot, though, for a very different reason, and if you’re a fan of either side, you would do well to prepare now for the possibility of the Ducks and Huskies working together — or at least adjacent to one another, in pursuit of the same goal — as each Pac-12 campus prepares its response to Thursday’s stunning news that USC and UCLA have gone nuclear.
West Coast football as you know it is ending. Take whatever time you need to process that. USC and UCLA are leaving for the Big Ten and will be taking the lucrative Los Angeles TV market with them. There is likely nothing the Pac-12 can do to offset the ramifications of that move in its upcoming media rights negotiations.
And look: It’s hard to see a way this is good for college football. Time was, regional relationships mattered. USC joined the PCC in 1922, UCLA in 1928. They won conference championships and played in Rose Bowls and became flagship programs and, once college football came under the spell of profit maximization, the two schools most important to the Pac-12’s media rights valuation. In the wake of Texas and Oklahoma skipping town on the Big 12 last summer, it would have been silly to think the Pac-12 wasn’t just as vulnerable to one (or two) of its powers acting in similarly cold-blooded fashion. There just wasn’t anything to signal it would happen so soon.
But while it’s no fun today being one of the league’s other 10 schools, there are two that appear better positioned than their remaining peers to actually make something of their football futures. And they have little choice now but to act swiftly and aggressively — and, dare we suggest, together — to secure that outcome.
The Pac-12 is losing USC and UCLA, but Oregon and Washington still have each other. And each school still has enough to sell should they attempt to follow the Trojans and Bruins to the Big Ten.
Advertisement
Much as Washington fans don’t want to hear it, Oregon is the more recognizable brand nationally. The Ducks have leveraged their affiliation with Nike co-founder and mega-booster Phil Knight to smartly align themselves with one of the world’s most recognizable corporations, and they’ve also simply won a lot of football games in the past two decades. They’ve played for two national championships in the past 13 years, they recruit nationally and they’re fully invested in competing at the highest level.
Washington also carries enough weight to position itself as a value-add to another power conference. Seattle is a top-15 TV market, and the Huskies have a well-resourced athletic department with a healthy donor base. Even as season-ticket sales have declined due to COVID-19 and the disastrous 2021 season, Washington still is among the Pac-12 leaders in attendance. It also was the last Pac-12 team to make the College Football Playoff and has put more players in the NFL in the past five years than any conference team. The school’s academic credentials might also appeal to a conference like the Big Ten, which, like the Pac-12, takes pride in such things. Both Oregon and Washington are members of the Association of American Universities.
Washington’s brand doesn’t resonate nationally like Oregon’s, but Oregon doesn’t bring with it as large of a TV market. Taken together, the schools could form an appealing duo should the Big Ten seek additional poaching candidates.
There are politics at play here, of course. There will be folks in positions of power at Washington and Washington State — as well as the state legislature, and maybe even the governor’s office — who would not find it palatable for the state’s two largest universities to break from one another in such front-facing fashion. Would it signal the end of the Apple Cup game? What about the Oregon-Oregon State rivalry? Would it harm non-athletic relationships between the schools? Is there a solution to this mess — a two-conference merger, perhaps — that involves WSU and Oregon State accompanying Washington and Oregon wherever they might land, preserving some measure of regional stewardship in this increasingly soulless enterprise?
That’s to say nothing of where Stanford and California, Arizona and Arizona State or Utah and Colorado might go, if anywhere. But if relationships with Washington State and Oregon State aren’t enough to keep Washington and Oregon from breaking with tradition — and in this modern landscape, you should assume until further notice that nothing is sacred — then the two rivals simply can’t waste any time worrying about how other conference peers navigate the fallout.
Advertisement
These are calculations that leaders at Washington and Oregon likely have been weighing for some time because it wasn’t difficult to see college football stratifying toward superconference territory. Washington athletic director Jen Cohen speculated about the possibility a year ago, when SEC expansion talk dominated Pac-12 media day. She seemed similarly torn about traditions falling by the wayside as she pondered the possibility of the sport’s biggest brands positioning themselves for inclusion in a superleague. But the thought of Washington not having a seat at the table was even less appealing.
“We want to be champions,” Cohen said last July. “And so none of us want to find ourselves in a position where we’re in a situation where we can’t have access to be the best.”
Cold as this reality is, the Pac-12 no longer affords that without USC or UCLA, and it barely did with them. Whether the conference continues to exist after they depart remains to be seen, but Oregon and Washington should do all they can to ensure they’re long gone by the time we find out.
(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)